Sam sat next to him on the bed. “Hey, Dad, how are you?”
Dad turned his head. There was a disinterested look in his eyes, the gloss of complacency and confusion. “Are you the ‘lectric man?”
“No, Dad. It’s Sam.”
Recognition dawned. “Oh, Sammy. My son. How’s the farm?”
Twenty-one years ago Dad had suffered brain injuries of his own and never recovered. His was a slow, steady decline into a faraway land of make-believe and mental trickery. A place Sam was afraid he too was headed.
“Everything’s fine,” Sam said. “How have you been?”
Dad shrugged. “Can’t complain. Was in Chicago last week. My plane was late, though. The mechanic came up to me, and he says, ‘Buddy’—he always calls me Buddy—’you got a bad time of it. Hope you’re not in a hurry.’ I told him I needed to get to Idaho for a convention, and he laughed. I don’t think he knew the plane was mine.”
“Sounds like you had a quite a time,” Sam said. “Hey, I’m gonna go out and talk to Mom, OK?”
Dad leaned in close and lowered his voice. His breath smelled like rotting meat. “Don’t mention the Buick. She gets real upset when you talk about the Buick.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Sam started for the door, but Dad stopped him.
“Sammy, how’s Tommy? He still playing the trombone?”
Tommy had played the trombone for the school orchestra in fourth and fifth grade. But two years were all he could endure, and against Mom and Dad’s wishes, he quit and turned in his instrument.
“No, he’s not.”
Dad looked disappointed. “Oh, he was good, y’know. Used to play marches for me. Make sure you take his dinner down to him.”
His dinner down to him. Boy, that stirred memories Sam would rather forget. But they were never really forgotten, were they? “Sure, Dad. No problem.”
Sam returned to the kitchen. Mom was busy at the sink peeling onions.
“Mom, you ever think of Tommy?”
The question caused her to jerk, as though slapped by an unseen hand. “‘Course I do. Every day. What kind of fool question is that?”
Sam hesitated. He rotated the glass in his hands. “You ever think you hear his voice or even see him?”
She grabbed a dishrag from the sink and began wiping the countertop. “‘Course not. Thomas is gone. You know that.”
The way she said “You know that” hit Sam in the chest. She still hadn’t moved on; she still blamed him. But it wasn’t his fault.
You did what you had to do, son.
“How about dreams? You ever dream about him?”
Mom stopped and looked at Sam. Her lips were tight and eyes narrow. He knew that look, had seen it a thousand times growing up. “Samuel, if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not talk about this anymore. It serves no purpose at all. Now, why did you come here? It wasn’t just to visit your mother and say hi to your father.”
“I need the key to the old house.”
Two decades ago a wall had been erected between him and his mother, and it had never been torn down. He’d lived with her and his father in the rancher until he was nineteen, then left to get a place of his own. During those four years he lived at home after Tommy’s death, he and Mom rarely spoke and mostly stayed out of each other’s way. Mom got a job as a telephone operator for a direct-marketing company, and he landscaped part-time until going full-time with a construction crew after his graduation from high school.
She looked at him as if he’d just asked her to exhume Grandpa. “Absolutely not. You’re not going anywhere near that place.”
But Sam knew where the key was. She kept it in the drawer next to the silverware, the junk drawer.
“I need to, Mom. I need to see the place again.”
“Why, Samuel? Why would you want to go back there?”
“Why not? It was my house too.” He paused and collected himself. He was surprised by the emotions—anger, frustration, confusion, fear—scratching their way to the surface. “I need to settle a few things. Work a few things out in my head.”
Mom dropped her gaze to the counter, and her hands trembled. “Please, Samuel. You’re all I have left. Please don’t. That place …” She raised her eyes to meet his. There were tears in them. “It’s evil. I know it. It caused our family so much pain. I can’t take no more of it.”
“Mom, what happened to—”
“Hush!” She pointed a finger directly at Sam’s face. “Don’t you mention it. That house … that cursed house got to him. It wasn’t his fault.”
“I know it wasn’t his fault,” Sam said. And he did know it. What’d happened to Tommy was nobody’s fault. It just happened.
“Your father loved him to the end, you know. And I did too.”
“I did too.”
Mom scrunched her face up as if she’d just sucked on a lemon, and Sam knew she didn’t believe him. She would never believe him.
“Mom, I need the key, and I’m taking it.” He walked around the counter to the drawer.
“It’s not in there anymore,” she said. “I moved it.”
“Why? Where?”
After releasing a labored sigh, Mom said, “‘Bout a year ago, I guess it was. I got itching to go down the lane and see the house again. It’d been a good five or so years since I last laid eyes on it. I just wanted to see how bad the weather had been to it.” She glanced out the window in the farmhouse’s direction. “You know how I used to keep the place up.”
“It was always immaculate. The gardens, the painting, the windows.”
“It was my pride. I was shocked to see how worn and old it looked. Kinda like me, I guess.” She looked up with fear in her gray eyes. “I coulda sworn it was calling to me, Samuel. Like it was alive and wanted me. I don’t know if it was my imagination or if it really was calling to me, but I felt like a fish on the end of a line with a big old hook in my mouth. And I know, I just know, that if I’d a-gone to that place, it would have eaten me up and spit me out, and I wouldn’t be sitting here today.”
A heavy feeling settled in Sam’s stomach. “Mom, it was probably your imagination.” But was it? Was Tommy’s voice only his imagination? Was seeing Tommy at the memorial his imagination? Were the grass letters on the seat of his truck his imagination? Kill Lincoln. “Your mind was playing tricks on you. I mean, after what happened there.” He stopped. He didn’t want to go any further, and he knew she didn’t want him to either. “Where’s the key, Mom?”
She wrung her hands and let out a mournful whimper. “I buried it in the backyard. Out by the maple.”
“Is it marked? The spot?”
She shook her head. “No, but it’s right in front of the trunk. There’s a root sticking up from the ground, and I dug a hole between it and the trunk. You’ll see. There’s a trowel in the garage, on the wall with the garden tools.”
He knew the spot. He rested his hand over his mother’s. It was cold, so thin and frail. “Thanks, Mom. And don’t worry, OK?”
She looked away. “‘Don’t worry,’ he tells me.”
“I won’t be long,” Sam said. “Just want to take a look around.”
Thirty-Six
THE KEY WAS RIGHT WHERE HIS MOTHER SAID IT WOULD BE, buried about four inches down in a metal key box.
The house was nothing like Sam remembered. Mom was right; she and Dad had always kept the place immaculate. The paint was never chipping, the flower beds never infested with weeds. The picket fence around the front yard was whitewashed every spring, and the windows always sparkled.
What stood before Sam, though, as he crested the rise in the lane, was a beaten and weary old home, one that had suffered years of neglect and simply given up the fight. The paint was chipped and curled and worn off in some areas, revealing the gray clapboard siding. The porch roof sagged in the middle, which made the house appear to be smiling, but not with a smile of joy. Covered with two decades of grime and residue, the windows were lifeless, hollow eyes. An
d waist-high weeds and witchgrass filled the flower beds.
The sight of the farmhouse, so tired and weathered, put a knot in Sam’s throat. Memories of summers filled with painting and clipping and mowing and digging rushed through his mind like a fast-moving train. All that work, and for what?
He approached the house and pushed through the gate. It opened smoothly and latched again on its own. The sidewalk, though overgrown with grass, was still in good shape. The porch was not. Sam skipped the three steps and sidestepped a few sagging boards on his way to the front door. The key still fit perfectly and turned without a hitch. The dead bolt clicked, and the doorknob twisted easily.
When the door opened, Sam wished he had brought along a flashlight. The interior was darkened, but enough muted light filtered through the windows to illuminate the rooms. The place reminded him of a sarcophagus—empty, musty, lifeless. To his left was the living room. One three-legged sofa table leaned on its side, but other than that the room was bare. The rest of the first floor was no different. Dust and cobwebs were the only occupants.
Sam moved through the living room and came out into the hallway again. The staircase rose in front of him. It was still solid and sturdy, but the boards were creakier than he remembered. At the top of the stairs was Sam’s old room. Tommy had stood there with the rifle, the one he had wanted Sam to shoot him with. The door was closed.
As Sam reached for the knob, metal clanged down in the cellar. He knew that sound. He’d spent many nights fighting sleeplessness, listening to that sound.
Somewhere on Sam’s way down the staircase, the clanging stopped. He stood at the cellar door feeling short of breath and weak. He didn’t want to go down there; he knew what he would find. And yet he felt he had no choice. He drew open the door and flipped the switch at the top of stairs, but of course the power had been turned off years ago. There was enough light, though, coming through the windows below to keep the cellar from being totally dark.
One step at a time Sam descended into the underworld of the house. Halfway down his head cleared the ceiling, and he saw the crate. It looked the same as it had the day Dad built it, with the exception of the broken boards on one side.
Unwilling to go closer, Sam sat on the step. That crate, that horrible crate. He thought of his brother, so long ago. Tommy’s condition had worsened until he was unfit to be around the family. His outbursts became more frequent, his violent tendencies more belligerent. He was no longer Tommy Travis; he was a creature that only resembled Tommy. His eyes seemed to grow darker and sink further into his skull. His lips thinned, and his cheekbones became more prominent. He dropped pounds by the day, which may have explained the changes—or it may have been something else.
Afraid of what others would say should Tommy be placed in an asylum, Dad built the basement crate. It was large, twelve-by-twelve, with a cot in one corner and a toilet basin in the other. The little door in the front could be slid up and down to push plates of food through. It was Sam’s job to feed his brother. But Tommy wanted none of any of it. He sat in the corner, smeared with his own feces, and hurled insults and curses the three times a day that Sam delivered the meals.
It was a Thursday when it happened. The plate was still in the crate after all these years. Sam remembered sitting on these same steps with…
… a metal plate of Mom’s fried chicken and stewed carrots on his lap. He was always afraid to go down past the seventh step. It was the halfway point, the point of no return should something happen. Dad had built the crate out of thick, knotty oak, but Tommy’s strength seemed to increase with his hatred. And if he ever got out of there—
“Hey, sissy boy,” Tommy said from inside the crate. “You gonna come down here or not? Maybe I can eat you.”
Sam stayed put, trying to muster his courage. He was fifteen, too young to deal with this kind of fear. He hated his parents for making him endure his brother’s insanity.
“Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you, sissy boy. You too scared to come any closer? You too scared? What a sissy you are, a pathetic little sissy. A momma’s boy. Why don’t you come over here and bend over and let me spank your sissy butt? Momma’s ‘little precious.’”
This was how it always went, and Sam told himself each time to just do it quickly. Descend stairs, cross room, open door, slide in the plate, get out of there. Easy enough. But each time he stopped, afraid to go closer, and endured the insults and taunting.
And Tommy was relentless. “I bet you never even kissed a girl, sissy. You’re too much like one. It’d be like girl-on-girl with you. Why don’t you come over here so I can give you a kiss, a big sloppy one right on the lips, show you how it’s done.”
Enough. Sam gathered his courage, descended the rest of the stairs, and crossed the cellar.
“Oh, oh, look, he’s comin’,” Tommy said. “The sissy grew a backbone.”
Dad had built the crate with the two-by-four slats six inches apart, enough for an arm to fit through, and every time Sam brought the plate, Tommy reached through and tried to snag Sam’s arm or hand. Sam had to be quick or get caught, and if he ever got caught, well …
He threw open the little door and slid in the plate, just as Tommy’s hand shot out. “Come here, ya little sissy, you girl. I’ll rip your arm off and eat it in front of you.”
Sam kicked the door closed and fled upstairs, chased by his brother’s curses. He didn’t stop on the first floor. He ran all the way to his bedroom. Even from there he could hear Tommy hollering and carrying on and banging the metal cup against the plate.
The clanging.
Eventually the clanging stopped, and the thudding began. Sam knew immediately that Tommy was throwing himself against the twoby-fours, trying to bust loose. That possibility puckered the skin on Sam’s arms. He turned the key in his door to lock it. Not that it would stop a raging Tommy-thing, but it offered some comfort for the time being.
After fifteen minutes of the thudding, Sam heard splintering wood and an animal-like bellow that resonated up through the floorboards.
Tommy was loose …
Now, on the seventh step, Sam clenched fistfuls of hair and let the tears come. But this was not a healing cry, far from it. Instead, the memory opened a gate to the darkness in the cellar, and Sam felt it pressing in, begging for entrance, for control. It was the same darkness that had enshrouded Tommy and Samuel Whiting before him. And now it wanted Sam Travis.
For what purpose?
Kill Lincoln.
The voice came as if someone were sitting on the step next to him.
Kill Lincoln.
It was Tommy’s voice. His brother. The one they’d caged and treated like an animal. The one who had become an animal.
Sam looked across the cellar and shivered. Tommy was there in the far corner behind the furnace. He stepped from the shadows and approached the steps, but the darkness seemed to cling to and surround him with that anti-glow. Sam wanted to get up and bolt. He wanted no part of this apparition, yet something held him there, whether fear or curiosity or guilt, he couldn’t tell. Midway between the furnace and the staircase Tommy stopped. His face was still obscured, but there was no mistaking the shape of his body, outlined by that lightless haze.
“Kill Lincoln.” It was Tommy’s voice, but different, deeper, more guttural.
Sam said nothing. His fingers dug into the wooden step, his heart thrummed like a motor in his chest, and sweat popped out on his forehead.
Tommy sniffed. “Look at you, crying like a sissy. Once a sissy, always a sissy.”
“I’m not.” Sam found his voice, wiped the tears from his cheek. “I’m not a sissy.”
“Once a sissy … always a sissy.”
“Why are you back?” Sam felt crazy talking to this hallucination, but he needed to know.
“I’ve been gone a long time, little brother. Little traitor.”
“I had to do it. You know that. You wanted me to.”
Tommy growled, then mocked Sam. “‘You wanted me
to.’”
“Why are you back?”
“Kill Lincoln, little brother. Grow a backbone.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Tommy took a step backward. “‘Course you don’t. Sissy. But you will. Give it some time.” After three more steps backward, he stopped and said, “Once a sissy, always a sissy.”
The figure retreated quickly now, moving behind the furnace.
Sam’s blood went hot. “You shut up, you hear,” he hollered. “You shut up.”
Back into the darkness Tommy went, vanishing from sight.
With tears streaming again from his eyes, Sam stood and climbed the steps two at a time. He had to get out of here. Had to get out of this house.
Thirty-Seven
SAM STEERED THE TRUCK INTO THE DRIVEWAY AND HAD AN eerie feeling of déjà vu. Hadn’t he just done this yesterday? The arriving home, with Molly not knowing where he’d been. The questions, the arguing. He was in no mood for that again. His visit to the old house had left him shaken and irritable.
For a second, the briefest of moments, he considered telling Molly everything. Spilling his guts to her. Recounting the auditory hallucinations, the visions, the memories, the writings, the grass KILL LINCOLN on the seat, the cage in the basement, his weird confrontation with Tommy, everything. But he decided against it.
There would only be more questions. She’d want him to see a shrink. The shrink would probably want to dump him in some asylum where he’d be labeled a kook and signed up for group therapy and forced to share a room with a guy who thought he was Frank Sinatra. No way. He could handle this on his own. He knew the difference between reality and fantasy, and he’d just ignore the fantasy part.
Sam gathered his manila folder and exited the truck.
Molly was standing on the front porch, arms crossed over her chest, head cocked to one side. “Nice of you to finally come home,” she said. Her tone was anything but friendly and welcoming.
He blew right by her and into the house.
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